Gday...

1789  -     Captain William Bligh, after being cast adrift following the mutiny on the 'Bounty', arrives at Timor.

William Bligh was born in Plymouth, south-west England, on 9 September 1754. He was only 8 when he first went to sea. At age 22, he was chosen to join Captain Cook's crew on the 'Resolution', and became commander of the 'HMAV Bounty' eleven years later.

The famous mutiny on the Bountry occurred after Bligh left Tahiti on his way to the Caribbean. For reasons undetermined by historical records, Master's Mate Fletcher Christian led the mutiny, with the support of a small number of the ship's crew. Theories have abounded, foremost among them being Bligh's stern discipline and tendency to push his crew very hard. Bligh and his own supporters were provided with a 7m launch, a sextant and enough provisions to enable them to reach the closest ports, but no means of navigation. Bligh chose not to head for the closer Spanish ports, which would have slowed down the process of bringing the mutineers to justice, but instead completed a 41 day journey to Timor. From here, he stood a better chance of communicating quickly to British vessels which could pursue the mutineers.

After navigating some 5,600km from memory of Cook's charts and voyages, Bligh and his surviving crew arrived at Timor on 14 June 1789. After recovering in Timor and being tended to by the inhabitants of the Dutch colony, Captain Bligh finally returned to England, arriving there on 14 March 1790. His men had suffered starvation, scurvy and dehydration. Whilst some of them died from the ravages of the journey, many of them survived to serve in the Royal Navy once more.

1823  -     The Brisbane River is discovered by three ticket-of-leave convicts, Parsons, Pamphlett and Finnegan. Oxley is later credited with the discovery.

Richard Parsons, Thomas Pamphlett and John Finnegan were three ticket-of-leave convicts, and timber-getters. They had been blown off course in a wild storm off the Illawarra coast of NSW, and, believing they were south of Port Jackson, headed north. They had a fourth companion, Thompson, who became delirious from lack of water and eventually died. His body was dropped overboard. The three remaining men became shipwrecked on the southern tip of Moreton Island. They made their way across the Moreton Bay islands to the mainland, then north where they came across the Brisbane River.

Aborigines assisted the men with food and shelter. During the course of their ventures, on 14 June 1823, they came across a "large river": they were the first white men to sight this river. John Oxley, meanwhile, was surveying the area as the site for a possible penal settlement. He came across Pamphlett and Finnegan on Bribie Island, and Parsons later rejoined them, having travelled further north. The men showed Oxley the large river, which he later named the Brisbane River, after Governor Brisbane. Because of Oxley's position as surveyor-general, he became the one credited with the discovery.

1864  -     Alois Alzheimer, the man who first identifies the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, is born. 

Aloysius "Alois" Alzheimer was born on 14 June 1864 in Marktbreit, Bavaria. He was a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist, and the first to identify the symptoms of what is now known as Alzheimer's Disease.

Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease, and the most common cause of dementia. It is characterised clinically by progressive intellectual deterioration, behaviour changes and gradually declining activities of daily living. The most common early symptom is memory loss (amnesia), which usually manifests as minor forgetfulness that becomes steadily more pronounced as the illness progresses, yet older memories tend to remain intact.

The symptoms of the disease as a distinct entity from senility were first identified by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, and the characteristic neuropathology was first observed by Alzheimer. He observed the disease in a patient he first saw in 1901, and published his findings from his postmortem examination of her brain in 1906. Although Krepelin and Alzheimer essentially worked together, because Kraepelin was dedicated to finding the neuropathological basis of psychiatric disorders, he made the generous decision that the disease would bear Alzheimer's name.

Alzheimer died of heart failure at age 51, on 19 December 1915.

Cheers - John